Event Schedule

The Campus Martius Museum highlights migration in Ohio's history. The museum is on the site of the fortification built by the Ohio Company of Associates, as their headquarters, in 1788 when they founded the first organized American settlement in the Northwest Territory. The restored Rufus Putnam house, part of the original fort, is now enclosed within a wing of the museum. Behind the museum is the Ohio Company's Land Office.

Exhibits on the main floor of the museum focus on the early settlement of Marietta and Ohio and contain many of the original pioneer artifacts. The exhibits also explore the prehistoric Indian populations that occupied this area and relations with the historic Indians as the white settlers moved in. Other areas explore such topics as surveying of the land, early government in the old Northwest Territory, and life in early Marietta. A separate area exhibits a variety of material from the Marietta area down through the years, from items of household furnishings, to toys, to tools, to fire prevention equipment.

The focus of the exhibit Paradise Found and Lost: Migration in the Ohio Valley, 1850-1970 goes beyond Ohio's early settlement. It explores two later waves of migration that shaped the state's history: the movement of many rural Ohioans to cities between 1850 and 1910, and the influx of Appalachians from Kentucky and West Virginia into Ohio's industrial centers such as Dayton and Akron between 1910 and 1970.

The exhibit includes 90 objects from OHS collections, ranging from an early mechanized seed drill to a jacket worn during performances by contemporary country music singer Dwight Yoakam, the son of Appalachian emigrants. In addition to artifacts, exhibits contain audio accounts taken from diaries and journals kept by these people on the move, video views of factory and city life, and interactive computer programs showing migration patterns and Ohio's economic development.